My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 496: Mysterious Meeting & Seeing Zack Again

They later dropped Melissa and Emily off outside a café in the business district — one of those places that looked like a coffee shop from the outside but probably hosted negotiations that moved continents on the inside while the barista pretended not to notice the body count.

A woman was waiting for them at a corner table with her back on them. The posture of someone who sat in rooms where decisions were made and never flinched, even when the decisions involved quietly ruining lives before lunch.

Melissa walked toward her without hesitation, Emily half a step behind with her laptop bag already open like she was ready to document the next corporate assassination.

Phei watched them through the windshield, engine idling.

“Who’s that?” he asked. “The woman they’re meeting.”

Maya shrugged from the passenger seat. “They didn’t tell me, either. I think that was the point — since they knew I’d tell you, they kept it to themselves.”

Phei pulled away from the kerb, eyes lingering in the rearview for another second.

“Mysterious,” he muttered. “Mysterious, mysterious.”

Maya chuckled and hugged his arm while he drove — pressing her cheek against his shoulder, silver hair spilling across the sleeve of his black tee like liquid moonlight.

She didn’t ask where they were going.

Whatever it was, wherever he was taking her, she was there. That was the arrangement. Not spoken, not negotiated. Just understood.

They stopped at a mall.

Not one of the massive Paradise monuments to excess — a smaller one, quieter, the kind of place where the staff actually smiled because they wanted to rather than because their contracts required it.

Maya followed him from shop to shop and watched.

He bought gifts. Careful ones. Specific ones.

Not the quick, expensive, point-and-purchase approach Sienna had demonstrated earlier that day — this was different. He lingered and compared.

Picked things up and put them back and picked up something else.

Thought about it.

Most of it was female. Soft scarves in muted colours. A silk robe in deep burgundy. A set of skincare products in packaging so elegant it looked like art and it did not look the first time he was doing the same routine.

Slippers — plush, warm, the kind you wore when your feet were tired and the world was too much.

Some of it was a bit mature — not young-woman gifts, not girl gifts, but things chosen for someone older, someone settled, someone who valued comfort and quality over flash.

Maya didn’t get nosy. Didn’t ask. Just carried what he handed her and kept her curiosity folded away behind that quiet smile.

He bought more. Edibles — boxes of chocolates from a Swiss shop, biscuits in tins, a selection of teas that he spent ten minutes choosing with the focus of a man defusing a bomb and then raw foods, gloceries and more before he went for drinks — juices and sparkling water in wholesale shopping enough to last a week, just like everything else he’d bought in plenty, a bottle of something expensive and non-alcoholic that came in a box with a ribbon.

And lastly, flowers.

A large bouquet. White and pale pink. Put together by a florist who clearly knew what she was doing — the arrangement was beautiful in a way that felt warm rather than formal.

Flowers you brought to someone you loved and hadn’t seen in too long.

They loaded everything into the car. Bags filled the back seat, the boot, the gaps between. Phei tipped the staff — generous, quick, the way he always did — and they drove away.

The route changed after that.

He turned off the main Paradise roads onto something quieter. More private. Trees lining both sides, the buildings thinning, the traffic dropping to almost nothing.

Maya watched the streets change through the window and said nothing.

Paradise General Hospital 2.

It sat back from the road behind gates and gardens — not the sprawling Legacy medical fortress 1 that the main families used, but the next biggest… the second branch.

They pulled into the visitors’ car park.

A woman was waiting near the entrance — standing apart from the patients and visitors, hands clasped, watching the road with the particular alertness of someone who’d been told to expect a specific car at a specific time.

She walked toward them the moment they stepped out. Quick steps and purposeful. Early thirties, maybe.

Neat hair and kind face and clearly someone who took her responsibilities seriously and had been doing so for long enough that seriousness had become second nature.

She bowed slightly. Not deep — just an inclination, respectful, genuine.

“Sir.”

“Diana.”

Phei’s voice was warm. Easy. The tone he used for people he actually liked rather than people he was managing or charming or dismantling.

“I’m glad to see you again, sir. It’s been—”

“You’re exaggerating. It’s only been a week and a few days.”

He was already pulling the bags from the back seat, reorganising the haul with quick efficiency. Everything for the hospital stay needs — the scarves, the robe, the skincare, the slippers, the chocolates, the teas, the drinks — and flowers.

Held the flowers carefully against his chest with one arm while he fished the car keys from his pocket with the other.

“Take the rest home for her,” he said, pressing the keys into Diana’s hand. “I’ll be in Mother’s room meanwhile.”

Diana took the keys. Her expression softened — that particular look that people who worked closely with someone’s family got when they saw genuine care and couldn’t quite hide how much it moved them.

“The Lady has been over the moon since she heard you’re visiting,” Diana said. “After this long, she’s been — well. You’ll see for yourself, sir.”

Phei smiled. Small and real.

Diana drove away with the bags and the car.

Phei turned to Maya, shifting the flowers to one arm and clasping her hand with the other. Their fingers laced together effortlessly—natural and unthinking, the way hands belong when the people they anchor have long since stopped wondering why they fit so perfectly.

They stepped inside through the revolving visitor doors.

Paradise General Hospital 2’s lobby glowed bright and clean, scented with antiseptic laced faintly through fresh flowers—that universal hospital aroma hovering between sterile hope and quiet dread.

Staff glided with purposeful calm while patients shuffled softly between chairs and corridors, everything humming with the steady rhythm of a place devoted to mending what was broken.

Phei and Maya passed through the main doors—and walked straight into Zack.

He lingered just five feet away, emerging from the left corridor, likely visiting a private doctor for his ’condition’ after Phei’s lesson, while clinging to a fragile pretense of normalcy, savoring what might have been his first halfway decent moment since the night fists had pulverized his world without a mark on their owner and crippled his manhood.

He glanced up.

Saw Phei.

His body detonated in primal reflex, lurching backward before a single thought could form—legs flailing in frantic reverse like a condemned soul glimpsing his tormentor risen from hell, flowers absurdly serene in hand.

His heel snagged on a mat edge or chair leg or the raw weight of relived agony, hurling him down hard; his body smashed the polished tile with a sickening wet crack, the impact shuddering through pristine white walls and yanking every gaze in the room.

Zack lay sprawled in ruin, body hijacked by unrelenting spasms—shoulders convulsing violently, hands clawing air as if strangling ghosts, jaw gnashing side-to-side while a guttural whimper leaked past gritted teeth, the scream he’d never fully voice.

This was terror incarnate,carved into marrow: nights of waking soaked in cold sweat, joints ghost-aching from phantom wrenching, every shadow bruising purple in his nightmares.

His hands clasped where his cock had once been.

His eyes—huge, glassy, swimming in salty terror—locked on Phei, pupils blown wide by the monster that had already wrecked him once… and now loomed for round two.

Phei scoffed under his breath, a faint ripple of disdain and disgust.

He didn’t break stride, didn’t spare a look or a word—not even fake pity. Just kept walking, flowers tucked in one hand, Maya’s warm fingers laced in the other, gliding past like Zack was yesterday’s trash smeared on the floor.

The elevator doors whooshed open. They stepped in. They slid shut.

Zack stayed crumpled back there, twitching under a wave of stares from patients and staff. A nurse hurried over, calm as pros get but wide-eyed at the meltdown triggered by one kid with a bunch of flowers.

Maya burst into giggles then—soft, unstoppable peals she tried to muffle with her free hand, shoulders shaking, eyes sparkling with naughty glee.

“How do you get away with everything?” she asked, her voice bubbling through another laugh.

Phei hit the button for the upper floors.

He flashed a small smile and shrugged.

Didn’t say a word.

The elevator hummed upward.